Historic image retouch assistance

I came across this site while trying to find techniques for this particularly frustrating problem with cracking and emulsion discoloration. To my non-cal monitor, the wavy lines appear to be an almost blue tint, though nothing I've tried selection-wise seems to be able to isolate them from the broad dynamic range behind. Of course, I would not like to sacrifice facial detail. I've masked the couple in the foreground and applied a minor surface blur in CS3, intending to rubber stamp/healing brush the details. The original is just under 2" square scanned RGB at 600 dpi.

I've started on this image and I'll go back and finish it later - these are the results so far and what I used.

I changed the crop to landscape. Depending on what is important in the image you can save yourself a lot of time and energy by invisaging the end result. If the buildings are equally important, then you would have to leave it as a portrait.

I did a little bit of healing, cos the rest is your job you can see the outcome of that on the woman's coat.

Decided that the people needed lifting a little bit so I used the central point in a curves adjustment layer to brighten slightly. Used inverted mask to paint back in the people, avoiding the woman and child's face because I thought they were bright enough.

Used the High Pass filter to sharpen the people a little bit, with layer set to overlay I inverted the mask and painted back the people - lowered the opacity of this as well to about 50%. High Pass only set to about 1.

That was it really. The second image has been given a slight sepia tone in a hue/sat adjustment layer.

EDIT-I haven't done any work on the cars, buildings etc., in the image you may find that you want to touch up the few offending pieces that are there.

Wow... thanks! I downloaded that demo plugin and will be purchasing it. Per usual, it seems it always comes down to the quality of the selection. I'm wondering if a gradual mask from foreground to background before applying the dust and scratch filter might soften some of the shallowness to the depth of field. Looks cool, but a little unreal. I messed with what you did to try and gradually sharpen to the foreground, but at this resolution it's hardly satisfying.